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Rudolph P. Byrd

Rudolph P. Byrd (1953–2011) was a professor of American and African American studies and the founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. He and Beverly Guy-Sheftall of Spelman College were the founding co-chairs of the Alice Walker Literary Society. His several awards and fellowships include the Thomas Jefferson Award from Emory University; the Governor’s Award in the Humanities; the Dick Bathrick Activist Award from Men Stopping Violence of Atlanta, Georgia; the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at Harvard University; the Dorothy Danforth Compton Fellowship at Yale University; and Visiting Scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Byrd is the editor of The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker (The New Press).